i went out
in bleary winter
to gather in some raw ideas
but the frozen ground
just glared back up at me
and groused:
Who are you to catalog,
What catalogs can't hold?
You are not the engineer,
But the imaginer of cold
incredulous, I sank back in my boots
and quickly started doing calculus:
these boots are stiff and salty.
how's that? who wears them?
the sky's the color of a road.
so what? who rides it?
the falling snow is writing Bach.
falling where? who hears it?
again the ground flared up at me
bald and rumbling:
There is no such subject
To an object uncreated
They are perpendicular
And thus always related
and sure enough,
the more I scribbled
the less I mattered,
and the more I vanished,
the less got finished,
until eventually,
reams of no poems
snowed down to the ground in shreds
unwritten and unread
